of Difference
The invention and institution of an imagined Mexico required the production and dissemination of narratives that sought to create a shared feeling of belonging and community among peoples—one that would, as B. Anderson (1983) suggests, transcend the ‘original' community of blood and face-to-face relationships. To be effective, the mechanics of nationalist discourse must steer individuals to recognize as their own the traits that signal and highlight what they all share. The erection of monumental flags added one more symbol to a long history of cultural colonization conducted by the center over the rest of Mexico. During the institution of the global post-colonial order, it was necessary to attain a solid cultural, economic, and politically consistent form in order to be recognized as a modern nation-state. One consequence of this demand was the veiling of regional differences, since, during the nineteenth century, multiculturalism was not seen as a virtue of the modern state. The operations performed on regional gastronomic traditions were similar to the procedures performed on other cultural practices involving regional differences, for example, religion, language, history, and ethnic identities. The affirmation of a nationalist ideology implicated a process of internal cultural colonization that, in turn, fractalized forms of imperial expansion and cultural colonization practiced by some nations over others during their history of imperial expansion and colonial domination. Although in the Mexican context the early use of the term ‘internal colonialism' was restricted to the description of the relationship of domination and subordination between populations of European and indigenous origin (see González Casanova 1965; Stavenhagen 1965), I follow Hechter ([1975] 1998) and Colley (1992) in understanding internal colonialism as a process whereby regional differences are silenced in favor of national unity. In the case of Mexico, similarly to that of Great Britain, as described by Hechter and Colley, we find a dominant central power in possession of the means to disseminate nationalist ideology (print media, radio, television, the celebration of national holidays in the schools) and with the military means to suppress resistance to the power of the metropolis. Ideologically, nationalist discourse defined the cultural differences that characterized the populations of the different regions as parochial infantilism and political immaturity, using the power of different media and state institutions to inscribe this view into the self-perception of local people (for the case of Yucatán, see Campos García 2002).
It was in the context of these political developments that the diet of the nation was distilled down to the basic pre-Columbian indigenous components: maize, beans, tomatoes, squash, and chili peppers. Reference to this diet authorized the reduction of Mexican cuisine to one and only one of the local codes; in effect, all regional cuisines were now viewed as dialectal variations of this same culinary code. Hence, the central Mexican narrative of the history of ‘Mexican food' and the anthropological study of a national cuisine can erase—or gloss over—meaningful regional culinary differences, building instead upon the cuisine of the central Mexican highlands (see, e.g., Corcuera de Mancera [1979] 1990; Flores y Escalante 1994; Long-Solís and Vargas 2005). The construction of a homogeneous nation has deep roots in Mexican history, and at least two levels of discourse can be identified. On one level, central Mexicans have invented a history of the nation defined by a teleological view that sees the diverse indigenous cultures converging into a common history of the Mexican people, a convergence explained by the ontological inevitability of cultural/racial mixing or mestizaje (Basave Benítez 1992). On another level, central Mexican elites fashioned a story of the dissemination of icons and symbols of central Mexican culture, drawn from central Mexican society and culture (or appropriated by them), and sought to impose them as markers of a single, homogeneous national identity.
From the nineteenth century onward, as Florescano ([2002] 2006) has shown, different accounts of Mexican national history were at odds over the interpretation of the relationship between European and indigenous culture. While some historians and politicians sought to erase the indigenous past in their narratives of the emergence of the Mexican nation,7 others attempted to incorporate indigenous people into the history of Mexico. At the end of the nineteenth century (1884-1889), a group of scholars dominated by central Mexican historians tied to the state, and led by Vicente Riva Palacio, forged an ideological narrative of the history of the nation that endorsed a common cultural identity. This story, titled México a través de los siglos (Mexico Throughout the Centuries), “had the virtue of bringing together past times in a discourse that joined the pre-Hispanic antiquity to the Viceroyalty and both of these to the War for Independence, the first years of the Republic, and the Reform movement” (Florescano [2002] 2006: 290).8 However, in the twentieth century, shortly before the Mexican Revolution, the story shifted, and rather than integrating indigenous groups as an evolutionary antecedent to the Mexican nation, the nationalist discourse emphasized the mestizaje of national culture. Neither indigenous nor European, Mexican society was conceived of as the blending of two different cultures. Against the prevailing negative views on miscegenation of that period,9 Mexican ideologues resignified mestizaje to convey the blending of proper virtues of indigenous and European societies and cultures (Basave Benítez 1992).
Mestizaje was to become, during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, a dominant issue in the nationalist agenda. Post-revolutionary Mexico required a façade of unity to confront the threat posed by other nations (the US, England, Germany, France, and Spain) who sought to exercise control over Mexican natural resources and trade. The ideology of mestizaje proved to be an efficient instrument in the erasure of difference. Regionalism was seen as an obstacle by some of the most influential central Mexican thinkers involved in the invention of the nation, who identified local and regional fatherlands as a hindrance to the constitution of one single nation. In Los grandes problemas nacionales (Great National Problems), Molina Enríquez ([1909] 1978) pointed to the urgent need to unify the country into a single Mestizo nation. His analysis of the different problems facing the new nation found them to be rooted in existing conservative indigenous and Creole groups, whom he viewed as the enemies of national unity. Consequently, along with his diagnosis, he prescribed that the Mexican state had the duty to intervene and to ensure the unification of the nation by assimilating and/ or erasing the different (stories of) origin, religions, (racial) types, customs, and languages, in their diverse evolutionary stages, in order to bring together the common desires, purposes, and aspirations of the Mexican people (ibid.: 396-424). Once unification was achieved, he suggested, patriotism could be understood as people living “all as brothers in a family, free in their exercise of their faculty for action; but united in the fraternity of a common ideal, and constrained to virtue by that same fraternity, on the one hand, to distribute equally the enjoyment of the common heritage that feeds them and, on the other hand, to the mutual tolerance of the differences that this enjoyment spawns” (ibid.: 425).
Manuel Gamio, one of the first Mexican anthropologists trained abroad (under Franz Boas), shared Molina Enríquez's and other intellectuals' beliefs of his time. In his volume Forjando Patria (Forging the Fatherland), Gamio ([1916] 1992) tells readers about his experience in Mérida, where he visited a bar. When he ordered a beer, the waiter gave him the choice between national and imported. He asked for imported beer and was served a XX, a beer brewed in the city of Orizaba (in the state of Veracruz in the Gulf of Mexico). He proceeded to question the waiter, who explained matter-of-factly that ‘national' (del país) means from Yucatán. From this anecdote, Gamio moved to argue that Yucatán was the only Mexican state where mestizaje had reached an advanced stage, distinguishing the people of the state, who have a strong sense of cultural unity, from people in other Mexican regions. He concluded that, in order to achieve a national sense of harmony, the Mexican state had the duty to promote mestizaje in the totality of the national territory (ibid.: 12-14).10
The homogenization of the nation has been continuously promoted through different literary means. For example, in El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), Octavio Paz ([1950] 2004) presented a powerful and influential argument about the nature and character of the Mexican people.11 Although he stated early in his essay that he was in fact making reference to a small portion of the population—that is, those who recognize themselves as ‘Mexican'—his narrative often transposed what he took from this group of central Mexicans to the totality of the inhabitants of the nation at large. Very often, this piece has been read as an analysis of all of Mexican